


Listen to the Music

by AmazingGraceless



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Discussions of War, Gen, Reflection, its a peaceful and introspective fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-02
Updated: 2020-08-02
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:20:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28050810
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AmazingGraceless/pseuds/AmazingGraceless
Summary: Demelza Robins has a few pre-game rituals to get ready for her Quidditch Matches.





	Listen to the Music

**Author's Note:**

> Another Quidditch entry. This one required a specific character for me and another member of the team to write involving Demelza Robins. I’d love to draw fanart at some point of this scene.

Demelza Robins lay on the highest bench of the Quidditch pitch, as the sun set over the trees of the Black Forest. With her enchanted Walkman on, courtesy of her technomancer brother, she could listen to her favorite music as she pictured herself hurtling through that same sky as the one turning indigo and orange and violet right in front of her very eyes, as the clouds transfigured into stars in the magic that was simply the world turning.

This would be her first big Quidditch match tomorrow morning. Her first one playing for the Gryffindor school team, anyway. Of course she had played a bit in the Flying Class all first-years had to take, and she had done a summer league of Quidditch back home, and had done alright there. She wouldn't have tried out for the part if a part of her at least didn't believe that she was up for the challenge. But as confident and self-assured as she might have been, the fear crept in all the same, as it did for anyone she supposed.

Over and over again in her mind's eye, she pictured all the ways that tomorrow could go wrong. She could fly off her broom, or drop the Quaffle, or, or, or—

 _Stop this_ , she told herself. _There's no use worrying over what hasn't happened yet. There isn't a thing you can do to change it or help at this point, so one might as well live with it_.

It was remarkable, how much her inner voice sounded like her mother's at times. As the tones of the Parselmouths and other witch rock bands played in her cassette tape and her giant headphones, she tried to settle into a more positive form of contemplation. After all, she'd liked to do this before her summer league games, too.

Of course, she'd fly over to the stadium under the cover of night, when the muggles couldn't see her, and that would give her a little more practice, so maybe that was why it worked better at calming her nerves than it was now.

But perhaps it was also that this had been a stressful year. Demelza and her family had grown more worried as they heard what happened to half-blooded families in Britain. You-Know-Who was on the rise, and Demelza was afraid that her muggle-born father would join the same fate as Hannah Abbott's mother.

While the letters her parents sent home every week were meant to reassure, Demelza had never been easily placated, not since she was a small child. She was too perceptive to her own good, too sensitive to the environment around her. She could pick up on what wasn't being said— and that was what worried her.

A part of her feared that it was indeed only a matter of time before she and her family would have to leave Britain and Hogwarts entirely to save their own skins.

_Not a very Gryffindor idea._

She tugged at the golden chain of a necklace she was wearing, played with the little lion-shaped pendant. It had been a gift from her mother, to celebrate her Sorting— even if it didn't match her parents' or her brother's. They were a group of Ravenclaws and Slytherins, and that included her mother's line— the Grimsditches were mainly a Slytherin House even if they were certainly never Death Eater material.

Demelza knew that it was smarter, that it would allow them to stay together and survive if they left the country. She knew from the brochures and the letters with addresses in Massachusetts that they were looking into their cousins across the pond. Ilvermorny, she supposed, wouldn't be that much of a change from Hogwarts, from what she heard. And she did only have three more years left.

Still, while it was in the nature of her brother and her mother and her father to be self-preserving and ambitious, it was in hers to be brave and rise to challenges. And not just on the Quidditch pitch tomorrow.

It wasn't her fight— it wasn't supposed to be. That's what all the adults had been saying. But as Demelza toyed with the little lion pendant, she thought of the previous year at Hogwarts, of Umbridge and her reign of terror. She had been hellbent on denial, had been trying so hard to keep the students from realizing the truth. But in the process, she had brought the war to Hogwarts.

Every war was for the young to fight— Demelza had been able to discern that much from the history textbooks she sneak-read during Binns' lectures. That had happened in the first war against You-Know-Who, and in the war against Grindelwald before him— and so on.

She reached instinctively for her wand in the pocket of her jeans. It felt sturdy in her grip, and she remembered what Ollivander had told her.

"Redwood and phoenix feather, eleven and a half inches precisely, unyielding."

Unyielding. That was how the rest of her family had described her. When she set her mind to something, she'd do it, and she'd move heaven or hell to accomplish her goals. She'd often been reckless and had sometimes gotten hurt in the process. But she never hurt others in the process.

She supposed that was what made the line between Gryffindor and Slytherin in the Sorting Hat's mind— that was what made her so different from the rest of the family, and yet so much the same.

She knew, as she opened her eyes again to see night, that the war would someday come to a boiling point she couldn't ignore. And she would have to step up like Harry Potter, like the teenager as and the young who had fought in the wars against evil before.

But for now, she decided as she made little sparks with her wand, she would focus on Quidditch, and being a girl for just a little while longer. But now she no longer had any doubt that she would do her part to win a victory for Gryffindor.


End file.
